Cat's-Paw, Inc.

by L. L. Thrasher

  She did. She met me at the door, wearing my T-shirt over a pair of her panties.

  “I thought I bought you some clothes,” I said.

  “You did, but this is comfortable. And you’re early. You said an hour.”

  “From now on I’ll be absolutely sure not to let you know exactly when I’m coming.”

  She nodded, then blushed prettily when she realized what I had said. When she joined me at the table, wearing her jeans and the new T-shirt, she looked relaxed and happy, very different from when I first found her. I hadn’t given much thought to searching for her ID again and since she was, for once, eating as if she were hungry, I kept my mouth shut and didn’t bring up her past or her plans for the future.

  About halfway through the meal, she asked if I had a girlfriend in Mackie. “Not the way you mean it,” I said.

  “How do I mean it?”

  “Dining and dancing, hearts and flowers, billing and cooing.”

  She looked puzzled. “What do you do?”

  “We sleep together now and then.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much fun. Stop laughing at me. It doesn’t sound very friendly anyway.”

  “We aren’t friends.”

  “How can you sleep with someone who isn’t even a friend?”

  “I know her better than I know you.”

  Her cheeks reddened. “That was different. Besides, we didn’t do anything.”

  “You were considering it seriously enough at first. I think a long-term unemotional arrangement is a little better than a one-night stand in a motel.”

  “It just seems so cold. Is that the way she wants it?”

  “It was her idea. She’s been married three times. Twice to drunks and once to a man who spent all her money on presents for his girlfriends. She doesn’t like men very much. She likes sex.”

  “And what about you? You don’t like women?”

  “I think women are God’s masterpiece. I just don’t want one screwing up my life at the moment.”

  “Like April did?”

  “Like April did,” I agreed.

  “What did she look like?”

  The past tense irked me. Carrie always talked about April as if she were dead, too. The one time I complained, Carrie told me I was crazy, people always talk about people in the past tense when they are no longer in contact with them. She was right, but it irked me anyway.

  “She has dark hair, big brown eyes. Kind of an Audrey Hepburn face.”

  “Was she tall?”

  “About five-six. Short, from my point of view.”

  “I’m five-nine,” Allison said. “And a little bit.”

  I grinned. “That makes me six-three and a little bit.”

  She took a bite of her cheesecake. “This is good.” She cleared her throat. “How tall are you?”

  “Six-four.”

  She sighed. “Five-ten just sounds awful. It’s almost six feet tall.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with being tall.”

  “I really don’t want to be a virgin anymore.”

  “You sure can change the subject in a hurry. There’s nothing wrong with being a virgin either. In fact, it’s nice. I wasn’t sure they even made nineteen-year-old virgins anymore.”

  “Do you mostly look for runaways?”

  “There you go again. Mostly I do very routine, fairly boring work for lawyers and insurance companies. I get quite a few missing persons but most of them have skipped out on creditors or are trying to dodge child support payments. I’ve had a few adoption cases, people looking for their natural parents or parents looking for the kid they gave up. Let’s see, what else do I do? Bodyguard, occasionally.”

  “That sounds interesting. Whose body have you guarded?”

  “Usually just some man who’s carrying around a lot of cash. A writer who lives in Mackie hired me to go to Paris with her last year. She wanted to get some first-hand information on the seamier side of Parisian nightlife and didn’t want to go alone. So I had a very well-paid vacation and all I had to do was keep the Frenchmen from pinching her fanny.”

  “Did you sleep with her?”

  “Did I sleep with her?”

  “Well, it sounds romantic. A lady writer and her handsome bodyguard in the City of Love.”

  “I see.”

  “Does that mean yes?”

  I smiled. “I think that probably means none of your business, babycakes.”

  “Which means yes. Oh, is she the one who isn’t a girlfriend the way I mean it?” I didn’t answer, which must have meant yes again because Allison asked, “Is she famous? What’s her name?”

  “She sells a lot of books, but you wouldn’t recognize her name. She writes romance novels under three or four silly-sounding pen names. Nanette Nightingale is the only one I can ever remember. The others are worse, believe it or not. I need to change. I have to get going.”

  Allison had cleared the table by the time I came out of the bathroom. She watched with interest while I made a neat knot in a tie. When she told me I was doing it backwards, I checked the tie—which looked just fine to me—and asked her what she was talking about. She said I usually dressed up in the daytime and wore jeans at night.

  “It was pouring down rain today and I have a business appointment this evening.” Maintaining eye contact while lying is an art I acquired years ago. Being good at it didn’t make me feel any less guilty. I pulled her down on the bed for a quick cuddle, which turned into a long cuddle because she felt so good. I was starting to worry about being late picking Virginia up when Allison pulled away from me in the middle of a perfectly good kiss.

  “I’m not really anyway,” she said.

  I rolled my eyes at her. “You’re not really what anyway?”

  “A nineteen-year-old virgin.”

  I thought that over very carefully, looking into deep blue eyes in a face that was not at all childish.

  “An eighteen-year-old virgin?” I asked.

  “In April.”

  I sat up. “This past April?”

  “Next April. Of course, I might not be a virgin by then.”

  I got off the bed in a hurry.

  “Jesus Christ.” It was almost a prayer. “You’re seventeen. Jesus Christ. Seventeen! Seventeen is… Seventeen is…” I knew exactly what seventeen was. Second degree sexual abuse. “Holy shit, this is child molest.”

  “I’m not a child,” Allison said, very huffily, and then she started laughing.

  “There is nothing funny about this. I don’t believe it. I checked into a motel with a minor. My god, are you in high school?”

  “No, I already graduated.” She had stopped laughing but she was having trouble looking serious. “I don’t know why you’re so upset. It’s only two years’ difference.”

  “That’s not the point. You’re seventeen. You’re a baby. I’m almost thirty. I have no business messing around with a nineteen-year-old but at least it’s legal. Jesus, why did you lie to me?”

  “I felt safer being nineteen. And I wasn’t sure you’d give me a ride if you knew how old I am.”

  “How young you are,” I corrected.

  She frowned, watching me pace in the space between the beds. “Does this mean you’re never going to kiss me again? I wish I hadn’t told you.” After a moment, she added, “People always think I’m older than I am. I think it’s because I’m so tall.”

  I checked my watch. I was going to be late. “You and I are going to have to have a long talk. In legalese, you’re a CINS, a Child In Need of Supervision. You aren’t old enough to be on your own and you sure as hell aren’t old enough to be with me. You said your parents died. You must have a guardian.”

  She shook her head. Her chin quivered. Tears brimmed over her lashes. “I don’t have anyone,” she sobbed.

  I sat down beside her and put my arm around her. “Don’t, Allison. You’ll make yourself sick again.”

  She sobbed out something about the police and I promised I wouldn’t turn her
over to them and I promised she could stay with me for now. She didn’t ask me to promise to kiss her again but I did anyway—kiss her, not promise to. It was a very chaste peck on the cheek as I was leaving the room and she botched it up completely by turning her mouth to mine and clinging hard against me. Seventeen!

  Chapter Nineteen

  If Virginia found me distracted during dinner, she didn’t mention it. I had a hard time thinking about anything but Allison’s age, although after a couple of glasses of wine the plunging neckline of Virginia’s slinky blue dress began to demand more and more of my attention.

  We topped off Italian food with dessert in her apartment, after which we played in the shower long enough to drain the hot water heater.

  Virginia had been on a shopping spree. Her refrigerator was stocked with a bag of apples, four cartons of yogurt, and a bottle of Paul Masson Brut. We drank the champagne lounging naked on her bed which led to more dessert. After a second very fast, very cool shower, guilt got to me and I decided to check in.

  I stretched out on the bed beside Virginia, who was toweling her hair dry, and reached across her for the phone on the nightstand. Dora answered my line. I said hello and she said, “Where the hell have you been and who’s the girl in your motel room?”

  “Out and none of your business. Who wants me?”

  Dora lowered her voice to a breathy purr. “Brandy wants you to meet her at the Skidmore Fountain at midnight.”

  “Did she say how we’re supposed to recognize each other? Red carnation on the lapel or something?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in lapels, blue eyes.” Dora laughed, probably because she had seen me in nothing on several distant occasions. “She just said meet her. She sounded like a hooker.”

  “What’s a hooker sound like?”

  “Her gum-popping almost broke my eardrum.”

  “That should narrow it down. A gum-popping prostitute. How many of those can there be in Portland?” I told her I’d call again later and replaced the telephone, nuzzling Virginia’s flat belly in passing.

  “I have an appointment with a prostitute in thirty minutes.”

  She grinned. “Are you sure you’re up to it?”

  “He needs must go whom the devil drives. Whatever the hell that means. Where did I drop my clothes?”

  “By the front door. You were in a hurry.”

  “I thought I did pretty well. I kept my clothes on in the restaurant. That dress should be rated X.”

  “It is,” Virginia said. “No one under eighteen admitted.”

  I didn’t laugh as hard as I might have if her comment hadn’t reminded me of my underage roomie. Virginia followed me into the living room, curling up naked on the couch to watch me dress. When I crouched beside her for a good-bye kiss, she stroked the creases in my cheeks with her index fingers. “You could come back later,” she said.

  “I’d like to. But don’t wait up. If this woman knows something about Jessica, I may get tied up.”

  “Never let a hooker tie you up.”

  I laughed and kissed her again and headed off to Old Town to see what Brandy had to offer.

  Back in the 1880’s when Stephen Skidmore bestowed the fountain bearing his name on the City of Portland, Southwest First Avenue and Ankeny was the center of town but, even before the turn of the century, fires and floods had convinced the businessmen and the city fathers that it made more sense to build on higher ground away from the banks of the Willamette. Downtown shifted southward and the Skidmore District shifted downhill until it was more of a skid road district.

  The Willamette has long since been tamed by a seawall and in recent years Old Town has been making a comeback. MAX tracks now dissect First Avenue. Lower rents and a renewed interest in the historical value of the area have lured businesses back into the neighborhood. On weekends, hordes of shoppers throng to the Saturday Market, which has grown too big to be contained in its original location under the foot of the Burnside Bridge. The open-air market now spills out into the adjacent open areas right to the Skidmore Fountain itself, which sits off-center in a brick plaza formed by a widening of First Avenue. The big octagonal pool of the fountain has a short flight of steps on four sides and horse troughs on the other four. In the center of the pool, two vaguely Grecian women stand back to back on either side of a column, holding aloft a large basin from which the water spouts and flows.

  Mr. Skidmore’s fountain is inscribed with the words GOOD CITIZENS ARE THE RICHES OF A CITY. Even with the renewed civic interest in the area, not many of the people loitering there at midnight meet the criteria.

  I parked a block away and approached the fountain on foot, thinking as I always think when I see it that the fountain would look more at home in Paris or London than in Portland. The girl standing by the fountain would have looked more at home out on O’s Stroll.

  Even for a hooker, Brandy was blatant. She was short and twenty pounds underweight with unnaturally blonde hair moussed into a mass of wet-looking curls. A white fake fur jacket was thrown across her shoulders. She was wearing a black vinyl micro-miniskirt, black lace stockings, and red shoes with four-inch heels. Her breasts were too big for the rest of her and were unrestrained beneath a red and white striped top. She looked like a bad caricature of a Parisian whore.

  I had never seen her before but she knew who I was. As soon as I reached her, she flapped Jessica’s picture at me, saying, “How much you paying, man?”

  “Depends on how much you know.”

  “Shit, man, I know everything.”

  “You know where Jessica is?”

  “Huh? Oh, the girl. Yeah, kinda. I know who knows. So how much?”

  Brandy had a month’s worth of makeup on her face. Her mascara was in thick clumps and her lipstick had worn off, leaving a thin scarlet outline. She was jittering badly, toes tapping, fingers twitching, tongue darting out to moisten her cracked lips. Her pupils had shrunk the irises to a thin circle of brown. She looked thirty and probably wasn’t old enough to vote.

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks now, more later if your information’s any good.”

  “Fuck. Shit, man I gotta have real money.” She turned angrily away and teetered up the steps at the base of the fountain. She sat on the broad curved rim and crossed her legs. Bright red panties showed in the hap where the skirt stretched across her crotch. Pale flesh rippled above the elastic tops of the stockings. She leaned toward me, her eyes widening melodramatically. “I gotta get out of town, man. They’re gonna kill me if they find out I told.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “Huh?”

  “Never mind. I’ll give you a hundred bucks up front.” Information from junkies is questionable at best, but no one else was offering any.

  “Fuck you,” Brandy said. She pulled a thin brown cigarette out of her purse and placed it between her lips, raising her eyebrows at me. A real lady. I flicked my Bic for her, grateful for the acrid tang of the smoke. Brandy’s last bath had been a few johns ago.

  Along tendril of smoke curled out of her mouth. “So how much?”

  “A hundred.”

  “Fuck. Didn’t you hear what I said? They’re gonna fucking kill me, man.”

  “Nobody’s going to kill you,” I said and there was a loud sharp crack and Brandy fell backward into the Skidmore Fountain.

  I had my gun out before she splashed and I spun around in a crouch, the .38 in front of me. Two dozen people were running in three dozen different directions. I didn’t see anyone with a gun. I didn’t see anyone standing still enough to aim a gun. I straightened up and took another good look around. The last person in sight was a drunk who was just rounding a corner, his legs wobbling, unused to such speed.

  MAX was coming, its white sides gleaming surrealistically in the light mist, its wheels whirring quietly against the track. As the train slowed for the stop, the driver leaned forward, peering at me and my gun and Brandy’s legs sticking out of the fountain behind me. The train picked u
p speed, passed me by. I heard angry protests from unobservant passengers who had just missed their stop.

  And then MAX was gone and we were all alone, just me and Brandy at the Skidmore Fountain and when I turned around to look, I knew it was just me.

  Her legs were bent at the knees, the calves protruding over the fountain’s rim. Her mouth and eyes were open under the water. Her hands were floating.

  I pulled her out anyway, checking for a pulse just in case, and arranged her neatly on the ground, straightening her arms and legs and tugging the wet skirt down to cover her panties. One of her fake nails had come loose and was dangling from a thin shred of adhesive. The nail beneath was bitten to the quick. I pressed the scarlet plastic back into place as I crouched beside her amidst the scattered clutter that had spilled from her purse.

  The entry wound in her right temple looked oddly benign and was bloodless, cleansed by the cool water of the fountain. In its search for an exit, the bullet had turned the left side of her head into a mass of torn tissue and shattered bone. I looked elsewhere while I waited for the cops.

  Bundy wasn’t going to like this.

  Chapter Twenty

  Bundy thought it stank.

  “This stinks,” he said.

  That pretty much summed it up. “I suppose you aren’t buying coincidence?”

  “I’ve been a cop a lot of years. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that coincidence sucks.”

  “That was no twenty-two tonight.”

  “No, but we’ve got two girls shot with the same gun and one of them had your runaway handbill and we’ve got another girl shot while she’s talking to you. Start at the beginning and don’t leave anything out.”

  I started at the beginning and told him about Jason and Lily and Hank Johnston and Celia Baines and the supercilious son-of-a-bitch at the Rose City School of Performing Arts and Virginia Marley at the Northwest Acting and Modeling School and about all my traipsing about town. I diluted my relationship with Virginia to a couple drinks at a bar and left Allison out completely.